Author Q&A with Sara Maria Hasbun

Sara Maria Hasbun is an American linguist, currently based in Beijing. You can find her on instagram, @misslinguistic. Her short fiction, Tbilisi, appears in our spring issue.

Tell us about yourself. 

Before I started writing fiction, my background was in linguistics. I’ve always been fascinated with the very different ways that languages describe and categorize the world, and as a college student I set for myself the impractical goal of learning the five languages of the UN (Spanish, French, Mandarin, Russian, and Arabic). I liked the fact that they mostly came from such distinct language families, and yet would also give me access to such a large swathe of the world. I didn’t learn all those languages to fluency, but learning their structures really did open my eyes to new ways of thinking.

That led me, for awhile, into working as a translator. Later I started a consultancy. My work has almost always been remote, so I was very lucky to spend extensive time living abroad. 

I only recently started writing fiction, and I think the main impetus for that was feeling like I was having trouble processing reality. I was living in China during the pandemic, I was reading Chinese news and American news and European news and feeling like the more I read, the less I actually understood. I was also living in a small, tight-knit community of foreigners and locals, wonderful people who I love fiercely. But everyone in that small community knew a little too much about everyone else, or worse, operated under the dangerous assumption that they did. I started to realize just how easy it was to subvert reality, to invite delusion.

You would think that would lead me towards surrealist fiction or magical realism, but I find reality even more insidious and confusing, so I’m sticking with literary fiction for now.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the origin, revision process, and/or final version of your piece appearing in this issue?

I have this habit of falling in love with cities, especially cities that feel like they’re on a precipice, cities that are about to cross a threshold. That sort of precipitous change seems to turn all inhabitants into thinkers. In those kinds of cities, very few residents have the luxury of being complacent or incurious. So if you turn up in a city like Tbilisi or Beijing, you are immediately thrown into a conversation. Everyone is asking big questions. It feels almost impossible to end your day without feeling like you’ve learned something new about humanity.

In Tbilisi, during the times that I visited, everyone was asking big questions. What is a nation? they asked. What is sovereignty? What does it mean to be accountable to your country? What does it mean to be accountable to the people that you love?

What did you learn (about yourself or craft or life in general) through writing and revising it?

To be honest, I was stuck on this piece for a very long time. The current Georgian situation (their nation, their culture, their history, their conflicts, their identity) is incredibly complex, and I really did not want the piece to sound like it came with a political agenda. 

And as with many other subjects, I felt like the more I learned about Georgia, the less I actually knew. 

But of course, when a person describes their experience of moving through life, their observations will naturally coalesce around one interpretation or another. To deny that would be unrealistic. 

Eventually I realized that I needed to lean, as I always should do, into that uncertainty, and bring the reader along as I try to piece things together. I tried very hard to write only what I saw and heard, and to avoid drawing conclusions. 

What do you hope readers take from the piece?

I want to bring the reader into the process of trying to figure out the world, I want them to question what they thought they knew to be true about themselves and their surroundings. Whenever I write, what I want more than anything is for the writing to bring about more questions.

I hope this piece encourages readers to think about their own relationship to accountability: who are they accountable to? What does accountability look like? And in a world where your country asks so much of you, how important is it to protect yourself?

Mostly, I hope it inspires readers to hold some empathy for people who are still figuring all of that out.

What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)? Or what have been the biggest influences in your writing?

Right now I’m fueled by confusion. So much about the world confuses me these days, and I write to try to make some sense of things. I really enjoy this process, I enjoy talking to friends about what I’m writing and what they are writing, and trying to come closer to some sort of understanding. I think you never actually reach fully reach an objective truth, but it is fun to help each other hold back the curtains, to try to get a glimpse.

How do you make expression a part of your daily life? Or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?

My favorite kind of day has me writing in the early afternoon. I “clock in” at one of my favorite Beijing cafes, I start writing, and then I pretty much blink and the sun has already gone down and my coffee is cold, and friends are sniffing around to see who will be the first to order a bottle of wine and ruin the rest of the day’s writing. It is truly a good life.

What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?

The good life is full of more questions than answers, because no one wants to go to a dinner party and hear someone give you all the answers. The good life is sitting around with people whose company you enjoy, having some good food and some good drink, and trying to piece together an understanding of reality. Ideally one that leaves room for hope.

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Thank you, Sara, for being a part of our growing community and for spending extra time with us on this Q&A. Best wishes with writing and wherever life and your travels take you next.